Lowry: The sad, sad song of Genesis Rincon

"Twelve-year-old girls," a mother of three girls once told me, "think they rule the world." They stand on the cusp of womanhood, defiant yet still innocent, still kids, all toothy smiles and effervescence, ever-confident in the promise that goes with them.

For Genesis Rincon, a 12-year-old with a big smile and, they say, a huge heart, that promise ended on a hard city street where too much blood has been spilled and too much sorrow played out. A place where too many tears have been shed for too many children taken too early.

Genesis Rincon's promise ended because Paterson's streets are not safe, because of the economics of guns, drugs and heartbreak, because of cowardice of politicians, because of police cutbacks and because in parts of the city, the recession — long declared dead by captains of Wall Street — remains alive and well.

So yes, let's have the conversation about guns again, especially the flow of illegal weaponry that pours into Paterson with all the constancy of the Great Falls in their April thaw. And let's remember how members of the U.S. Senate failed to act, after the Sandy Hook school massacre, on even a meager gun safety law that would have expanded background checks on all for-profit, gun-buying transactions.

Let's also have a conversation about more police and how to pay for them, given that the same four cities in New Jersey with the highest street crime are also the ones with a diminishing tax base, the same ones where roughly 1 in 4 residents falls below the federal poverty line. Mayor Jeffery Jones, Paterson's previous mayor, didn't cut those 125 patrol officers from the city's roster because he wanted to; the numbers said that he had to.

Lawless streets like those that crisscross Paterson's beleaguered 1st and 4th wards should not exist in New Jersey. They should not exist anywhere in this country.

And yet they do, because year after year, politicians refuse to take a stand on guns, on child care initiatives and on jobs programs. In light of the sad song that is Genesis Rincon, people will take on Governor Christie because of his tone-deafness and his politics-playing veto of sensible gun legislation that sought merely to limit the ammo clips of automatic weapons to 10 rounds per magazine.

What we should be beating up Christie for is his cold-heartedness, in general, when it comes to things that are important in places like Paterson, quality-of-life matters such as health care for poor women. In his first budget, the governor slashed more than $7 million in funding for basic reproductive health care services, money that was a life-saver for low-income and working-class women in our urban centers. More than four years later, they still struggle to find those vital services.

I guess what I'm getting at is that violence in Paterson, the violence that so savagely and indiscriminately struck down Genesis Rincon, doesn't occur in a vacuum, but in concert with the tatters of a community beaten down by too many years of too many people turning their heads and forgetting. During one of his political campaigns, 6th Ward Councilman Andre Sayegh said that "the assumption, for too long, has been that anything goes in Paterson. We need to change that [perception]."

Maybe that change is about to come. I have been amazed this week to see so many people, from all parts of the city, come together in support of Genesis Rincon's family, people possibly who have never spoken out before but have come forward now to say, "This will not stand anymore."

Of course, as Steven Austin, whose son was robbed and killed in Paterson in January, and who came out this week for a rally to show his support for the Rincon family, asked "What happens next?"

Paterson's street crime, particularly gun crime, defies an easy fix, for it is linked to a drug problem, a gang problem. More surveillance. More police. Partial curfews. All may have their place.

Yet the crime concern can't be divorced from a larger concern, one that did not sprout up overnight; it existed long before Genesis Rincon hopped on her scooter to ride home last Saturday. It is a problem whose roots run deep, that run toward socio-economics and education and in too many cases, bend toward utter hopelessness.

I keep thinking of the words of acting Paterson Police Chief William Fraher, spoken so eloquently during a press conference this week announcing the arrest of Jhymiere Moore, 19, in connection with Genesis Rincon's' slaying.

"She was in her place in her time," Fraher said, "and she had every right to assume she would get home uninjured."

There is an empowering element to those words, and maybe empowerment yet in the promise that one 12-year-old girl never got the chance to attain.

Indeed, the hope is that one day that promise will be in reach on the very street Genesis Rincon rode her scooter, a street whose children deserve the same chance to grow up as children on any other street in America.